Hello all,

My name is Kyle and I stumbled across your site while googling for a solution and figured I would ask you guys here. I was wandering what the steps are to take a program you've made in JCreator or Netbeans or even using notepad and command line compilers, and make that program into a piece of software. I'm sure I could find it myself on the internet but I'm not real sure how to search for it. Is there certain terminology I should be using? My friend was telling me he tried looking into awhile back and he said it had something to do with "packages" and "jar files" but he wasn't ever able to figure out how it all works together. I don't want an executable than unzips my program, I want to actually learn to take my JCreator programs and make them useable outside of compiler programs. Something I could do to burn them on a cd or such and execute the program by running just one file. Any help is appreciated. I'll continue looking myself as well.

Thanks for your time.
Kyle

Well First of all Welcome to DIC! Great to have you here.... There are a couple things we need to know to answer this question. First... What platform are you running on? If you're running on Windows then you can use a program called exe4j which converts your runnable jar files you produce from your IDE"s into executables that windows understands. If you're using OS X then no additions needed, you can execute runnable jar's without modifying anything by just double clicking on the jar.

As for your question with jar files, basically think of them as .zip files but for java. It is just a compression format specifically dedicated to java. And as for packages, you don't need to know about those quite yet, you can always just let netbeans create the package for you until you get a little more advanced and require different packages.

Hope this helps...

Cheers

hey Kyle , welcome to <Dream.In.Code> pertaining to your question, distributing your program as markhazlett9 can be through jar file, yet if you want to distribute it for windows, then you can convert your class or jar files to a single windows executable that can be burned on CD and run by users on other windows computers, to acheive that you will need a class or jar to exe converter program one good program which i recommend is exe4j which you can download for free: http://www.ej-technologies.com/products/exe4j/overview.html hope this helps, and good luck in your programming

Windows also knows what an executable .jar file is